Bill and Janice Templeton become
concerned about a stranger who keeps following and calling them and
sends presents to their 11 year-old daughter Ivy. The stranger
introduces himself as Elliot Hoover and tells them how he has come to
believe following a trip to India that Ivy is the reincarnation of his
daughter Audrey Rose who was killed in a car crash the same day that Ivy
was born. He is able to calm Ivy’s recurrent nightmares down by calling
her Audrey Rose. Hoover then abducts Ivy but is arrested. His
subsequent attempts to argue a case for reincarnation at his trial
become a cause celebre.

COMMENTARY:

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) gave birth to an enormous cinematic occult horror boom in the 1970s. The boom spawned such successes as The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976) and The Omen (1976), each of which propagated their own subgenres of imitators. Audrey Rose
came near at the end of that cycle when the genre had successfully
established itself among A-budget films and where the theme of evil
and/or possessed children was its overriding subject.

Both the film of Audrey Rose
and the 1975 Frank De Felitta book it is based on give the feeling of a
story that wanted to be something more serious that instead ended up
pigeonholed in the horror genre. Screenwriter/original novelist De
Felitta’s other works show him as a writer who wants to deal with the
supernatural as real (or at least the sort of supernatural that becomes
the stuff of tabloid magazines – reincarnation, hauntings, ghost rapes).
His novel was set up toward the purpose of placing an argument for
reincarnation on a courtroom stand, which must surely stand as the
ultimate arbiter of Western rationalism. (In reality though, the case
presented here probably would be thrown by any court – whether or not
Ivy is the reincarnation of Hoover’s daughter is surely irrelevant, the
only thing a court is interested in is the issue at hand – whether or
not Hoover abducted Ivy). The film does change the balance of the book
somewhat. In the book, the court case took up nearly three-quarters of
the story but in the film the court case is reduced to only two or three
showcase arguments and presented with considerable bias – no contrary
arguments doubting or questioning reincarnation are ever highlighted
from the prosecution’s side, for instance.

The film cannot escape the basic fact that
it is burdened by a wordy and static script. This however does lead to a
unique approach from director Robert Wise who uses the dialogue itself
as suspense. Wise hypnotically engages us in Anthony Hopkins’s
monologues, where one becomes so enrapt that even small movements like
the spilling of a teacup or the relatively uninteresting shot of a door
opening behind someone eavesdropping on a conversation is made to hold
suspenseful power. There are some effective scenes – particularly the
one with burns suddenly appearing on Susan Swift’s hands when she places
them on a cold window. However, try as Robert Wise might to turn Audrey Rose into an interesting dramatic film, the material remains solidly unmoving.

The first half of the film, set around
Hoover’s bizarre intrusion into the family digs into the 1970s Stranger
Danger peril. Hoover’s actions are designed with the intent of making
the family anxious – their being followed, anonymous phone-calls,
mysterious presents left, the child being abducted from school and from
the apartment – without any thought placed into why the otherwise
relatively rational Hoover is behaving so creepily. When we come to
understand where the character is coming from later in the film, such
furtive actions fail to make sense. The film’s generation of Stranger
Danger paranoia is ironically so effective that it becomes almost
impossible to view Hoover’s motivations normally and it is only through
turning of him into a passive wimp for the rest of the film and Anthony
Hopkins’s performance that the character succeeds in retaining any
sympathy. Far better at engendering sympathy is Marsha Mason who gives
an enormously convincing performance in what is essentially a passively
handwringing role. Young Susan Swift also manages to comes across as
mature and intelligent.

Robert Wise directed a number of classic films including Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). Wise’s other genre films are:– The Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945), two classic psychological horror films made for Val Lewton; the human hunting film A Game of Death (1945); the alien visitor classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); the haunted house classic The Haunting (1963); the Michael Crichton adaptation The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979).

Screenwriter Frank De Felitta has a number of other genre credits. He wrote and produced the overpopulated future film Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) (1971); directed/wrote the tv movie Trapped (1973) about a man hunted through a department store by dogs; directed/wrote the supernatural time travel tv movie The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan (1979); directed the American Gothic tv movie The Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981); wrote the interesting ghost story The Entity (1982); and directed/wrote the worthwhile psycho-thriller Scissors (1991).

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